Picture Perfect : Makkah Mean Time effective from Ramadan

MAKKAH – Muslims around the world can now set their watches to Makkah Mean Time in Ramadan when all four faces of the world’s largest clock atop a soaring skyscraper in the Holy City becomes operational.

The clock, more than six times larger in diameter than London’s famed Big Ben, will establish Makkah as an alternate time standard to the Greenwich meridian. At a conference in Doha in 2008, Muslim clerics and scholars presented “scientific” arguments that Makkah time is the true global meridian. They said that Makkah is the center of the world and that the Greenwich standard was imposed by the West in 1884.